And then I looked at Evelyn with her cheeks pink from laughing, and at Ethan mid-story with his hands in the air, and I understood that I had it exactly backwards.

My parents had not built that home so that it could become a museum of their absence.

They had built it to be full of exactly this — soup and bread and terrible jokes and helpless laughter on an ordinary night.

Being happy in it was not a betrayal of them.

It was the whole point of them.

It was the thing they had spent their lives trying to make.

And letting the laughter back in was not forgetting them; it was finally, at long last, honoring what they had made.